♦ In Defense of E-Mail

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg gave a speech recently at the Nielsen Consumer 360 conference. Her main point: Facebook is awesome, and it will replace e-mail.

Let me share a few thoughts on this.

I completely agree that Facebook has changed the fabric of our social lives, for the better. We follow updates of "friends" we haven't actually met or spoken to in years, generate grass-root causes for sensible and soemtimes less-sensible endeavours of mankind, or simply use it as a tool to organize your next party. It's great for all these things.



Sandberg's main argument that she kicked off with was that in order to understand what the world will do in ten years, you have to look at what teenagers do today. Therefore, since teenagers don't use e-mail that much but do use Facebook, the world won't use e-mail anymore in a few years.

I think that this is a false conclusion, simply for the reason that e-mail's main use today is business correspondence. It's the form of communication that has revolutionized global business as we know it today. Surprisingly enough, teenagers don't tend to own global businesses or even work for them. So the hypothesis is false: Teenagers will eventually use e-mail, when they start white-collar work at some company.

The much bigger question, I believe, is what the difference between e-mail as a concept and Facebook as a concept actually is. E-mail has a distinct features of communication that Facebook doesn't.

• CC and BCC: The corporate world is run by politics. The CC and BCC fields have gained enough meaning in the business world that they're used as a political tool. It's important to see who else is a direct addressee, and who is "just CC". It's also a powerful tool to let people know about communication without the receiving end knowing about it.


• Interchangeable, open format: E-Mail is technically an accepted format of communicating data. I'm no expert, but e-mail's dependence on Domain Name Resolution allows for a message to be sent across networks, across the internet from one address to another, without both parties having to be part of a "Facebook" network. This "open" standard allows for software that's tailored to a person's or businesses needs, such as custom e-mail handling routines, a variety of e-mail clients, the use of attachements and HTML or integration with CRM or even Unified Communication solutions.


• Organization: E-Mail messages can be handled by many clients. This allows us to organize and process e-mail efficiently. We can easily forward, reply and msot of all file messages in the cloud, on our computers or mobile devices however we think efficient. We can use the tool we believe to be best suited for our requirements. That's why some people use a web client, some prefer a desktop client. Some prefer the iPad version. And so it goes.

Granted, these aren't features that Facebook couldn't catch up to, but it's the main challenges they face. They need an interoperable, open format of communication if they want to delve into business. I believe that the strongest potential to take over this market lies in the hands of Microsoft, using their Sharepoint, Communications Server and Dynamics software suites and technologies.

Furthermore, our social lives, encompassing professional life as well as all other circles we're involved in, are terribly complex. Too complex for a Facebook to handle efficiently. Lists and a handful of privacy settings can't stand in for the masterful art of information handling we do ourselves everyday. What gets said at a dinner party can be harmful at work, and may not concern your choir group while you might want to share it with your parents. Facebook can't handle that, because it requires humans to start visually and physically mapping out their lives. People won't, and can't, do that.